House Cleaning - Toilets

Cathy Green: Hello! My name is Cathy Green and I am the owner of UpperCrust Maids. Today we are talking about how to professionally clean a home and in this particular segment, we are going to concentrate on how to clean a toilet.

Most people have fear and trembling when it comes to cleaning a toilet, but I promise you it is no big deal. First of all I need to tell you a couple of things about the toilet. Would you be surprised if I told you that there are more germs on your computer keyboard than there are on a toilet seat.

That should put your mind at ease. It's no big deal. When you are cleaning a bathroom in general, you'll need to have two pairs of gloves. You'll need one pair specifically for the toilet and then once you have finished the toilet, you need to discard those gloves, and then once you start cleaning the rest of the bathroom, you'll use your other pair of gloves.

Since we're only going to clean the toilet in this particular segment, I'm going to put my gloves on, and I'm going to share with you all the types of products that you'll need to professionally clean and hygienically clean a toilet.

First of all, you're going to need a toilet brush. I personally prefer the disposable kind, but if you don't have a disposable brush, you can just use a regular brush. But, I would recommend you place in at least once every six months.

You're also going to need something to clean the toilet bowl. My company is as natural as possible, we try to stay as close to the earth as we can. We use as many green products as humanly possible and for the inside of the toilet, I use this particular product, sometimes I use other products.

For the top of the toilet, we use just a general all purpose cleaner, and you can also use vinegar water for the toilet, for the outside of it. The main thing you want to be certain of however, is that you have a disinfectant. You must have a disinfectant that has the ability to kill germs.

This one says that it kills 99% of the germs out there. It's a virucidal, a tuberculocidal, a bacteriocidal, and it's a fungicidal. So you want and I have two different types of disinfectants, doesn't matter which one you use as long as you're using at least one disinfectant, that's very important for the toilet.

The first thing you want to do upon lifting a lid is you want to flush the toilet. That will get you some fresh water. It will bring the water up to its maximum level, so you will have something to really work with. While the water is coming up, you need to either take your cleaning powder or your cleaning tray, and you want to go around the rim of the toilet.

I also like to use a little bit of this pine solution, it's natural. I will pour a little bit of that in the toilet. Then, I want to sort of saturate to get the rest of the toilet ready and start spraying the rim, spray all around the toilet. And you just want to quickly clean.

Now, a lot of people use gargles, for when the water flushes out, but just be careful. So it's cleaned and then what you want to do is take the paper towel, and you want to clean the rim, discard, then you want to clean the seat. Remember to discard, then you want to close, see that. You want to put some more all purpose cleaner on here.

But in addition to that, because this is a part that people sit on, I'm also going to put some disinfectant on it. This particular disinfectant kills 99% of the germs. So you just sort of spray that on there, to wipe, get it really good and discard. Then, you want to put the seat down, put a little bit more of the all purpose on there, clean the rim. That means that you are on top of the seat, and then you want to really taking the time at the back if you have little boys living in your house, because they sometimes miss, and when they do, the urine sometimes ends up back here, and discard.

Then you want to go to the very top, to the tank, and you are going to put your all purpose spray on the tank and again, you want to take your paper towel to clean the tank, the side, front, and the other side and discard.

The handle as well as the handle -- the handle on the toilet seat as well as the handle that go to your sink and your door knob in the bathroom are the three areas of your bathroom that carry the most bacteria. So even if you are not cleaning your toilet daily, and most people don't, you do need to be cleaning the handles in your bathroom and the doorknob everyday.

You can actually use a disinfectant cloth, one of those disposable cloth. But the handle is very important, you must clean it daily. Make sure that you disinfect the handle, you can do that in just a second. You can either use a little disinfectant cloth or a paper towel do just as good as long as you use a disinfectant spray, and that's it.

It is now time to start with the bottom of the toilet. So you want to take your all purpose spray, you want to spray all around it. Again, you want to search for urine stains, and you want to get all the way in the back. This is part that people sometimes forget, and even the floor. You can do the floor by hand behind the toilet, and make sure you get the very back, and that's it, you discard.

Now that you know how to professionally and hygienically clean a toilet, the next thing we're going to do is talk about how to clean a television screen and a computer monitor.